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All on board for the 5th Edition of the Textkernel Innovation week!

With an ever growing team and an unrelenting drive to innovate, Textkernel organised for the 5th consecutive year its traditional end-of-the-summer Innovation Week.

11 teams and as many innovative project

With the double goal of nurturing innovation within the company and bringing colleagues from different teams together, a total of 11 teams formed around 11 pitches proposed by engineers and well as sales and marketing colleagues.

Teams worked through the week to conceptualise their ideas, develop their prototypes and draft their business cases making sure that each project would be both technically and economically viable.

All aboard the SS Rotterdam

On Friday afternoon the whole company descended into Rotterdam to present their work on the SS Rotterdam. The SS Rotterdam, also known as “The Grande Dame”, is a former ocean liner and cruise ship repurposed as a hotel since 2010.

After presentations by each team and voting for the best projects, it was time to relax. With a beautiful sunset over “de Maas” river, we raised our glasses to a successful 5th edition of Textkernel’s Innovation Week. A delightful BBQ was served out on the deck, after which we headed into town to explore Rotterdam nightlife.

CV for CV, a winning idea

The winner of this year’s innovation week was the team ‘CV for CV’. The project focused on improving the quality of CV parsing by using an innovative approach based on Computer Vision (also CV). This is a research area within Artificial Intelligence that deals with giving machines a high-level understanding of digital images. The same technique is used to build self-driving cars and space exploration vehicles. The team applied this to CVs to learn extensive formatting options so that specific layouts can now be parsed with a higher accuracy.

The second placed team developed a new management interface to allow for a better configuration of our Search & Match environments. The third place was awarded to a team that focused on building a network of servers that can dynamically allocate hardware in order to scale up our services while maintaining quality of service.

This 5th Innovation Week was once again a success and we are all looking forward to the next edition in 2018.